Nurses demand high standards in Minnesota

In the paper Wednesday Feb 13, 2013, in an article titled “Battle Brews in Minnesota over hospital nurse staff,” they are trying to make patients believe that somehow setting a standard for patient care would be detrimental to hospitals.

The hospitals have hired dozens of lobbyists to prevent this bill from passing. They say that this is not a monetary issue for them, but the first thing they mention is that it will cause lay-offs. Then they say that the decisions should be made by health-care professionals on a local basis, and that a patient in Ada doesn’t necessarily deserve the nursing care patients deserve at Mayo.

Nurses have been and will be lobbying on their own volunteer time trying to get the Minnesota legislators to realize that if nurses are taking time out of their personal lives that they should understand how important this is to get this bill passed.

The Minnesota Nurses Association is the professional union of more than 20,000 registered nurses in Minnesota. The MNA has been following the message that nurses consistently and more frequently have been championing that patients in Minnesota hospitals are often put at risk due to the local decisions of hospital CEOs caring more about productivity and profits over patient care.

The nurses are motivated to get this bill passed because they demand that Minnesota stays at the top of the standards for health care. The nurses are tired of seeing new nurses being thrown to the wolves, so to speak, by trying to fill holes in schedules that managers refuse to fill.

The nurses are told to suck it up and make do. Nurses have an obligation and a passion for nursing. They are tired of fighting with their managers for adequate staffing. The public needs to know that if nurses are asking for a staffing bill, it is the best interest of all Minnesotans. Any one of us could be lying in a hospital bed wishing a nurse had a few more minutes to actually take care of them. After all, a nurse is why you need to be in the hospital, not the doctor or the CEO.